It’s a far cry from San Antonio, Texas, in more ways than weather, but after a few years on the North Side, transplant Sandra Ostrander loves the neighborhood and Syracuse.

“I think it’s a city that wants change, that wants growth,” she said.

She and her husband, Richard Ostrander, live on Grant Boulevard. Ostrander met him after she moved to Syracuse from San Antonio in 2003 to be closer to her parents. Ostrander lived in Liverpool for a few years as a teenager, but life took her elsewhere.

These days, she is a grandmother who runs a full-time home daycare business. Still, she found time to weave herself into the fabric of the Northside TNT, the Butternut Community Police Center and to start a neighborhood watch group.

Last Saturday, Ostrander and a handful of other volunteers held the first “Northside CommUNITY.” She says she was event coordinator for the festival at Schiller Park. She said the intent was to bring together the diverse segments of the neighborhood, which is home to a concentration of refugee families from around the globe.

Agencies that support refugees say Syracuse receives nearly a thousand of them a year, and roughly 95 percent of them settle in the densely populated North Side.

Sometimes there’s tension between groups here already and the newly settled, and the idea of the festival was to ease those tensions, Ostrander said.

“Our thoughts and our hopes and our prayers are for unity, building a more united, more peaceful community,” she said.

She hoped the festival would help longer-time residents understand that the last thing refugees want is more trouble, after the “holy heck” they’ve lived through, Ostrander said.

“They want to live here peacefully,” she said.

The festival began with invocations from churches that represented different faiths and cultures, including Pastor Bhim Biswa, of a Nepali church.

The other festival organizers are Joel Rinne, Katie Scott, Gilda DiCaprio, Ernest Lewis and Gemma Ash. The event grew from a leadership training class they took through the Central New York Community Foundation, which provided a $3,500 grant to bankroll much of the event, Ostrander said. She solicited donations from local businesses to help cover the cost of the event.

Now that the festival is over, Ostrander is working to make sure it becomes an annual event, which she says will happen under the umbrella of the Butternut Police Center, for which she is the treasurer. But that’s not all she’s got on her plate. She’s working on the center’s project to provide Thanksgiving meals to some 30 refugees.